Iron Mountain ski jump

Sunday, May 22, 2016

WHEN BAD THEOLOGY IS GOOD THEOLOGY

CHRIST IN WINTER:
Reflections on Faith for the Years of Winter…

Our pastor, Jimmy Moore,
told a Tex Sample story in his sermon last Sunday. I heard Tex tell it a number
of years ago, but it’s the sort of story, like most Tex Sample stories, that
hits you with a new force every time.

Tex is a Mississippi boy
who became a seminary professor. But he never forgot his simple roots. Most of
his academic work was studying the religion of what he called “hard living”
folks, the ones whose dogs have died and their women have left and their pickup
won’t run, so there’s nothing left but to write a song about it.

Their songs, like their
living, are simple. They tend to favor church music like “In the Garden.”

Theologians and professors
and seminarians tend to look down on songs like “In the Garden,” though, not
just because they are simple, but because their theology is often downright
misleading. We get more of our theology from the church songs that we sing than
we get from the Bible or sermons, so it’s important that they have good
theology.

Personally, though, I
don’t worry much about the theology of hymns. If you trust and never doubt, he will surely bring you out. That’s
not good theology. Nobody is going to get brought out if it depends on never
doubting. But Charles A. Tindley’s “Take Your Burden to the Lord” is great fun
to sing, and its main point, in the title, is good theology.

Hymn writers are willing
to do some really bad theology if they can get a rhyme out of it.

Yes, most of us get most
of our beliefs from hymns and Christian songs, singing them in church and camp,
and it’s better to sing a Jim Manley song or a Charles Wesley hymn, because
their theology, as well as their sound, is sound, but let’s trust the Spirit a
little. I think there’s something right about a song that leads us to an
experience of joy, even if there is something wrong here and there with what
the words say.

But “In the Garden” is
just so bad in its isolationist and self-centered theology…the joy we share as we tarry there, none other has ever known… Come
on; you’re not the only one Christ ever talked to or walked with.

So one day in class, Tex
was making fun of that song, saying how bad it is. I’m no stranger to that. A
whole generation of seminarians learned to do that. Tex taught at St. Paul
seminary in Kansas City, and I started at Perkins School of Theology, at SMU,
in Dallas, but we had similar experiences about the song my favorite prof, H.
Grady Hardin, called “Andy.”

He said that it had
originally been intended as a popular love song, a tryst song: “And he walks with me, and he talks with me,
and he tells me I am his own…” But the composer hadn’t been able to make a
go of that, so he turned it into a religious song.

So Grady sang it to us as Andy walks with me, Andy talks with me, Andy
tells me I am his own…

That turned out to be one
of the most fun classes I ever had, because we got to talking, doing improv,
really, about all sorts of hymns.

Somehow we got onto
“adjusting” Christian hymns for other religions, such as “He’s the Lotus of the
Valley” for Buddhism rather than the Christian hymn, “He’s the Lily of the
Valley.” And “Buddha loves me, this I know, for the Sutras tell me so.”

I was never too hard on “Andy.”
It was my mother’s favorite hymn, and the only one she could almost play on the
piano. But I went along with the idea that a song that selfish, that
narcissistic, that terrible in its theology, has no place in Christian faith.

That’s what Tex Sample
said in his class, too. Afterward, a woman student came up to him.

“My father sexually abused
me until I was fourteen,” she said. “And after each time he did it to me, I
would go out into the back yard, my garden, and I would sing that song, and
remember that regardless of how bad it was, God loves me.”

I come to the garden alone, while the dew is still on
the roses. And the voice I hear, falling on my ear, the son of God discloses. And
he walks with me, and he talks with me, and he tells me I am his own, and the
joy we share, as we tarry there, none other has ever known.

There are times when that
is not bad theology. Sometimes it’s darned good theology.